Justice for Emmett Till

As a white child growing up in Alabama in the late 1960s and 1970s, I remember my mother telling me about the church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham in 1963.

As I grew older, I learned about other violence against African-Americans across the South, much of it happening just a few years before I was born. I grew up with a deep vein of shame and anger for my region, compounded by the fact that in most of these cases, white juries had not convicted the accused, or the authorities had been so indifferent that they did not even bring charges against anyone.

It’s never too late to pursue justice for these unsolved crimes. Although many Southerners would rather move on from this ugly moment, the Justice Department’s quiet reopening of the investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, 14, in Mississippi is good for the South’s collective soul and most especially its future.